Yesterday I donned a hard hat in order to have a first look at White Cube Bermondsey, Jay Jopling's newest outpost for his apparently ever-expanding empire of galleries. When people asked me about it later, I found it hard not to keep repeating the same simple word. It's big. Really big. Bigger than any other commercial art gallery in Britain – and probably, I gather, bigger than any other in Europe. In fact, in scale you could easily have it down as a respectable regional public museum. It's masses bigger than a lot of not-for-profit contemporary art galleries such as the Fruitmarket in Edinburgh, or the Ikon in Birmingham. It resembles, in fact, nothing so much as a good-size German Kunsthalle. (Or will do, when the workmen, who were scurrying around like mad when I visited, leave.) And, what with its bookshop and auditorium, and its putative schools education programme, it lacks only a cafe to make it resemble a public gallery rather than a commercial art dealership. (As I pointed out in my news piece, though, this makes commercial sense: the top end art galleries will seemingly do anything rather than appear to be actually selling things, and you certainly won't find anything so vulgar as a price tag. The new White Cube has private viewing rooms, so that clients can examine work and buy the stuff well away from the public gaze.)

It's not fancy, mind – unless there's all kinds of fancy stuff about to be put in at the last minute that I haven't seen. The spaces are (like I say) vast – but clean, white shells. The building itself is pretty unlovely – a functional 1970s warehouse, which White Cube have got for 15 years, and which they have commissioned German architects Casper Mueller Kneer to convert.

It's an interesting moment for this patch of Bermondsey. Already gentrified in a way that Hoxton certainly wasn't when Jay Jopling moved White Cube there in 2000, it will even so be affected – how could it not – by the arrival of this major new player. It will be fascinating to see whether the space is a harbinger of more art venues, drifting down towards the Old Kent Road and beyond.

The first show looks pretty cerebral: called Structure and Absence, it's a group exhibition with work by artists including Andreas Gursky, Gabriel Orozco, Robert Ryman and Jeff Wall (it opens on October 12, mid-Frieze week). The gallery will also be hosting smaller, "no-strings-attached" shows by emerging artists who may not have formal representation by the gallery, intially Marieta Chirulescu, Mary Corse and Kitty Kraus.

It was 1993 when Jay Jopling opened his tiny first gallery, on the second floor of a building in Davies Street, St James's. It was four metres square. The new place is 5,400 metres square. Just under 20 years, more than a thousand times the space – that's before you count the other two galleries, in Hoxton and Piccadilly, which will remain open for business. Size isn't everything: but there is a certain impressiveness to the trajectory.